[…] The first is further expansion of the social safety net. The second is an array of programs to act as a “springboard” for the poor. And the third is an “escalator” to address income inequality by giving progressively larger government grants to lower-income Americans.

On the safety net, the liberal plan begins with the premise that Obamacare isn’t enough. “The program will still leave millions without health insurance,” Konczal writes, “and it may fail, due to its complicated design, to contain costs.”

Many Americans might say: Now they tell us. But the fact is, the passage of Obamacare did not mean the president’s liberal supporters would give up on their dream of a federal single-payer health care system. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, called Obamacare a “starter home,” and for liberals it is just a first step toward their goal.

The other goal for the safety net is to radically remake the retirement system. Social Security would remain in place, but progressives are frustrated that 401(k) plans are used mostly by higher-income workers. So they want the government, in Konzcal’s words, to “provide a universal IRA with an automatic enrollment to all Americans, as well as shifting 401(k)s over to a public-private, defined-benefit plan.” Such a scheme would not only involve massive new federal spending, but would also create a vast new pool of previously private money under the government’s control.

That’s the safety net. The liberal “springboard” includes programs like universal taxpayer-paid preschool and guaranteed paid leave for all new mothers and fathers, to “make sure each person has the most opportunity possible.”

The third goal, the “escalator,” is perhaps the most radical. To address continuing income inequality, liberal thinkers propose sweeping redistributions plans. One is to increase the earned income tax credit so that it becomes a government wage subsidy for everyone who makes up to $80,000 a year.

First President Obama said “the private sector is doing fine.” Then he lectured business owners, “you didn’t build that.” Now he wants to extend the government’s auto-industry takeover across the board. Mr. Obama simply cannot understand how the economy can function without government’s firm guiding hand.

At a campaign stop in Pueblo, Colo., on Wednesday, Mr. Obama touted the alleged success of his government-backed takeover of two-thirds of the domestic car business. “The American auto industry has come roaring back,” he said. “Now I want to do the same thing with manufacturing jobs, not just in the auto industry, but in every industry.”

The Obama administration ritually flaunts the General Motors bailout as its model of success, but “government motors” is actually a cautionary tale. The bailout cost taxpayers around $100 billion, which means the government coughed up around $780,000 for every American GM job that Mr. Obama claims he “saved.” The feds hold 500 million shares ofGM stock, which has plummeted almost 45 percent since its initial public offering.

Believing in GM’s resurgence is only possible through creative accounting. GM counts a car as “sold” when it arrives at a dealership, not when it is in the hands of a consumer. The increased “sales” the administration brags about are surplus cars sitting in dealer lots, a practice known as “channel stuffing.” In a healthy economy, dealers have approximately a two-month inventory on hand; GM now has over double that. So long as GM pumps out cars that are “bought” by dealers, Mr. Obama can continue to claim things are looking up. Of cars that are actually driven off the lot, many are being bought by the majority stockholder: the government. In June, government purchases of GMcars went up 79 percent. This is a Ponzi scheme, not an economy.

Thanks to an Obamacare regulation that took effect on Aug. 1, health care plans in Oregon will now be required to provide free sterilizations to 15- year-old girls even if the parents of those girls do not consent to the procedure.

It says that all health care plans in the United States–except those provided by actual houses of worship organized under the section of the Internal Revenue Code reserved for churches per se–must provide coverage, without cost-sharing, for sterilizations and all Food and Drug Administration-approved contraceptives to “all women with reproductive capacity.”

In practical terms, “all women with reproductive capacity” means girls as young as about 12. That, according to the National Institutes of Health, is when girls usually start menstruating.

[…] HHS said nothing about restricting the provision of these free “preventive services” to women who were 18 or older, or 21 or older, or even 15 or older. The regulation simply said “all women with reproductive capacity.”

However, states have varying laws on the age of consent. CNSNews.com took a look at Oregon and its rule of consent for sterilization–one of the free services required by the Obama administration’s regulation.

In Oregon, the age of informed consent is 15, and the law and rules on sterilization are detailed in theOregon Revised Statutes (ORS) 436.205 to 436.335.

Under Oregon law, girls from 15 years of age and up are given complete control over whether to be sterilized or not. The parents or guardians of a minor girl–between 15 and 18–can neither grant nor deny consent for a sterilization.

Wheaton College, an evangelical institution, joined forces Wednesday with Catholic University of America to sue the government for requiring that it provide health insurance coverage for some abortifacient drugs to its employees and students.

Wheaton’s main reason for filing suit, Dr. Philip Ryken, president of Wheaton College, explained in a Wednesday conference call with reporters, is that the pro-life institution opposes the use of abortifacient drugs and would be forced to violate its religious beliefs.

“This insurance mandate is against our conscience and against our Christian convictions. We have no recourse now but to file suit,” Ryken said.

Ryken added that Wheaton and Catholic University also wanted to demonstrate cross-denominational solidarity on the issue of religious freedom.

“We have a respect for Roman Catholic institutions and in this case we recognize we have common cause with Catholic University of America and other Catholic institutions in defending religious liberty. We’re, in effect, co-belligerents in this fight against government action. I think the fact that evangelicals and Catholics are coming together on this issue ought to be a sign to all Americans that something really significant for religious liberty is at stake.”

John Garvey, president of Catholic University of America, said that the addition of Wheaton College to the now 24 lawsuits demonstrates that the issue is about religious freedom, not contraception.

This is the natural progression of a self-centered culture that devalues human life and treats children like a burden, a commodity to be traded, a disposable accessory to personal fulfillment, or a parasite to avoid at all costs.

No society can long survive with less than a 2.1 replacement birth rate, and the US is already below that.

So, what does sterilization do to a woman? And why does Obama want all women “with reproductive capacity” to be offered one for free?

Specifically, sterilization mutilates part of a woman’s body so it can no longer carry out its natural and healthy function.

By analogy, if a doctor severed a woman’s optic nerve her eyes would no longer see. Here, a doctor severs a woman’s fallopian tubes so her womb can no longer conceive a child.

Obama manifestly believes offering this particular mutilation free of charge to all women — but not men — is good. But why?

Human beings often sterilize dogs and cats, presumably because they do not believe canines and felines can develop disciplined reproductive habits and they see the proliferation of puppies and kittens as bad. But when human beings fix dogs and cats, they do not focus exclusively on one gender. Male dogs and cats are at least as likely as females to get their reproductive organs short-circuited.

Does the Obama administration look at women — but not men — as creatures akin to dog and cats? Does it believe women lack the hearts and minds and souls to fully control the destiny of their own families? Do they see the proliferation of human babies as bad?

After Obama signed Obamacare, his Department of Health and Human Services commissioned a federally funded committee at the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to recommend a “preventive services” regulation for women.

In its subsequent report, this committee explained its recommendation for what became the sterilization-contraception-abortifacient mandate in an eight-page section titled, “Preventing Unintended Pregnancy and Promoting Healthy Birth Spacing.”

[T]he Supreme Court didn’t just miss the opportunity to protect individual liberty. It also failed to defend religious freedom. The Court’s ruling to uphold Obamacare doesn’t mean the law has cleared its legal challenges, however. Twenty-three federal lawsuits against Obamacare’s Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate—which goes into effect on August 1—now take on added urgency.

The HHS anti-conscience mandate is a completely separate rule from the individual mandate, and its constitutionality was not considered by the Supreme Court in the cases decided today. The HHS mandate, along with the individual mandate and the rest of Obamacare, still presents a clear threat to individual and religious liberty. Nothing short of full repeal of the statute will adequately protect our freedoms from this federal overreach.

The next legal battleground against Obamacare resides in the fight to protect employers from the coercive requirement to provide coverage of abortion-inducing drugs, contraception, and sterilization under the HHS mandate.

Obamacare’s anti-conscience mandate affords the narrowest religious exemption in federal law, effectively covering only formal houses of worship. Countless other religious employers, like schools, hospitals, and religious charities, are forced to provide coverage for the mandated services despite moral or religious objections—simply because they step outside the four walls of a church to serve others.

The fight for freedom of conscience is one that cannot be abandoned. The Founding Fathers committed their lives and honor to the preservation of religious freedom and we should be willing to do the same. In an eloquent letter to the United Baptists in Virginia in 1789, George Washington wrote that if the government ever acted to render individual conscience “insecure” he would fight be the first to fight against it:

If I could have entertained the slightest apprehension that the Constitution framed in the Convention, where I had the honor to preside, might possibly endanger the religious rights of any ecclesiastical Society, certainly I would never have placed my signature to it; and if I could now conceive that the general Government might ever be so administered as to render the liberty of conscience insecure, I beg you will be persuaded that no one would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of religious persecution.

The fight against the Individual Mandate is finished, but the fight against the HHS Mandate is well underway.

A mass at Baltimore’s Basilica of the Assumption on Thursday night was the setting for the start of what U.S. Catholic bishops are calling a “Fortnight for Freedom,” a campaign “of teaching and witness for religious liberty.”

The initiative is in response primarily to the HHS mandate, part of ObamaCare, which forces Catholic and other religious institutions such as schools, hospitals, and charities, to provide free contraception, abortion-inducing drugs, and sterilization procedures for its employees in their health insurance plans. The mandate is set to go into effect on August 1st.

[…] The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has dedicated fourteen days from June 21st, the vigil of the Feasts of St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More, to July 4th, Independence Day, as a “special period of prayer, study, catechesis, and public action” that will serve to “emphasize both our Christian and American heritage of liberty.” The bishops chose June 21st as the starting date for the campaign because Saints John Fisher and Thomas More are both known as martyrs who were executed when they refused to deny their faith and beliefs in the face of persecution.

Why make special effort to defend religious freedom now? Simply put, because recent policy actions of the Obama Administration—and in particular the Obamacare anti-conscience mandate—have undermined religious freedom in a striking and unprecedented way.

The mandate upsets the kind of freedoms that Americans enjoy. It imposes a fine on faith by penalizing employers who choose to follow certain teachings of their church. Even though half of Americans report being pro-life, the mandate would punish employers who refuse to provide group health insurance covering abortion-inducing drugs.

Policies like the mandate imperil religious identity; they encourage individuals and organizations to suppress who they are and what they stand for. By threatening their core sense of identity and inspiration, such policies undermine the ability to serve God and others freely and effectively. After all, it’s often a group’s religious faith that makes it so effective in serving people in need.

Moreover, the mandate sets a bad precedent with the narrowest definition in federal law to date of what groups qualify for a religious exemption. To qualify, an organization must hire and serve only members of its own faith. This means that most churches are protected, but religious hospitals, schools, soup kitchens, and other ministries are not.

Finally, the anti-conscience mandate attempts to remake civil society—including religious institutions—in the government’s image by forcing them to adopt its values. By exercising this kind of role, the Administration places the federal government at the center of society’s focus and expectations. It claims responsibility for more and more of Americans’ needs, and it asks—and demands—more and more from citizens—including money, authority, and trust. In so doing, the HHS mandate, and Obamacare in general, directs to Caesar that which belongs to God.

If you think it’s wrong for the government to force employers to violate their consciences or to tell religious schools and hospitals that they aren’t religious enough to be exempt because they serve anyone in need or to treat access to free morning after pills as a more basic freedom than freedom of religion, then you have reason to defend this bedrock liberty during the Fortnight for Freedom.

It’s not too late to talk to your pastor about the Fortnight for Freedom. Join hundreds of other congregations across the country by ringing a church bell (or hand bells) on July 4 at noon Eastern time. For more information about how you can “let religious freedom ring,” see the Heritage Factsheet on this issue.

The second wave of religious freedom rallies took place on Friday, filling courthouse squares, federal buildings, and university centers from New York to Los Angeles with the Founding Fathers’ views of liberty and conscience.

Tens of thousands participated in the more than 150 events organized by the Pro-Life Action League and Citizens for a Pro-Life Society.

Early media coverage showed hundreds of people attended each major rally, holding yellow balloons that say “Religious Liberty” and waving signs that read, “Stop the HHS Mandate.”

In the nation’s capital, Michele Bachmann and Lila Rose expounded upon the Constitutional liberties enshrined in the First Amendment.

Jill Stanek spoke in Chicago. The San Francisco rally was emceed by Dana Cody of the Life Legal Defense Foundation. In Montana, a crowd gathered outside the officers of U.S. Senator Max Baucus, a Democrat who supports the mandate.

Attendees in Miami heard Archbishop Thomas Wenski say the HHS accommodation is no compromise, because “compromises are not usually arrived at unilaterally.” He said a fundamental principle of health care is that it “shouldn’t kill anybody.”

LifeSiteNews.com U.S. Bureau Chief Ben Johnson told a crowd of hundreds he was “astounded” as a journalist when he saw that “the best and brightest minds of Washington” decided “the most important aspect of the health care bill…was that every American, including post-menopausal women and gay men, needed access to birth control.”

Citing the history of Eastern Europe he said “light and transient offenses against our religious liberty never remain light and transient offenses,” but are usually the opening salvos of a greater war “to deny all our religious liberties. “It’s a test of our strength and our resolve, an attempt to set a binding precedent, and it’s an attempt to weaken our resources against the more serious assaults that are to come,” he said.

“We know that nature abhors a vacuum and that every inch that is yielded by the Church will be filled by a rushing, virulent secularism.” Quoting Patrick Henry’s “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” speech, he said, “We must fight, I repeat it sir, we must fight!”

Nick Thomm, the proprietor of StopHHS.com and an organizer of the local rally in Ann Arbor, noted the media blackout. “We cannot rely on the secular media to keep this issue alive before the American people in a way we would recognize as fair and accurate,” he said.

ABC, CBS, and NBC stayed true to their liberal slant and ignored the 164 rallies across the United States on Friday against the federal government’s abortifacient/birth control mandate under ObamaCare. Religious leaders and conservative politicians, like former GOP presidential candidateRep. Michele Bachmann, addressed the tens of thousands of pro-religious freedom activists who attended the rallies. But the Big Three apparently didn’t think this was worthy of coverage on their morning and evening newscasts.

By contrast, CBS played up the supporters of a group of left-leaning Catholic nuns during four on-air segments between May 30 and June 1, 2012. Correspondent Wyatt Andrews hyped how “hundreds of Catholics have rallied behind the sisters,” and that “protests in support of the nuns have been held in almost 50 cities.”

The networks have been reluctant to cover the controversy since the Health and Human Services Administration announced the mandate on January 20, 2012. It took CBS ten days to cover the story on their morning show, CBS This Morning. ABC and NBC remained silent for two weeks.

By February 15, the Big Three had spun the story as political food fight between liberal and conservatives and downplayed the Catholic Church’s objection to the regulation, along with freedom of religion aspect. A MRC study found that out of the 91 talking heads that appeared as part of their coverage of the mandate, politicians outnumbered Catholic Church officials by a margin of 60 to 9.

A gay activist group complained about pro-life signs and the police decided to censor them so nobody would be “offended.” The 1st Amendment protects FREE SPEECH, and you don’t have a “right” to silence those you disagree with – especially on public land! If you’re so “offended,” WALK AWAY like a grown-up!

Yesterday afternoon, I joined concerned citizens from around the Dayton area at the Stand Up for Religious Freedom Rally on the PUBLIC campus of Sinclair Community College. This was an official event sponsored by a campus group and part of a nationwide series of rallies being held today. I was the closing speaker for the rally, invited to speak to the crowd about getting involved and getting active.

As the Rally was starting the campus police informed us that all the signs and banners people were holding must be put on the ground after a complaint from a homosexual advocacy group leader. The police walked around the crowd telling people to put their signs down, that they could not hold them in their hands.

The policy does express a rule about the distribution of literature which was enforced on me for trying to give away free stickers. The problem is that this campus is funded with public funds and it is public property. The campus cannot make up rules that trample the first amendment of the constitution.

Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life said, “We praise the Lord for the rallies for religious freedom that occurred today, but something smells fishy in Dayton. Forcing people to put their signs down is certainly not a default activity of law enforcement in a country of free speech. This incident deserves thorough investigation, and we who believe in freedom of speech should press with all our strength to defend it.”

[…] Eric Scheidler of the Pro-Life Action League, the sponsor of these rallies said “This incident of civil rights infringement in Dayton, OH illustrates precisely why these rallies were needed so badly. Americans are forgetting the importance of faith in the public square secured by our cherished American freedoms. It is a blessing that this mandate has sparked so much celebration of these freedoms and such determination to defend them.”

This Friday at noon, pro-lifers and people of faith will be speaking out against the Obama administration’s unconstitutional HHS mandate, which seeks to force us to support the abortion holocaust and act against our consciences. This is about religious liberty under attack.

On June 8, Stand Up For Religious Freedom will hold its second round of national protests against the contraception mandate, continuing the movement that drew tens of thousands of protesters in March.

“We’re up to 154 rallies across the country now, which is about 10 more than we had last time on the rally day,” said Stand Up For Religious Freedom’s communications director Matt Yonke. The group is “expecting a few more (cities) to trickle in before Friday,” when the events begin at noon local time.

Organized in response to the Obama administration’s denial of conscience rights to religious institutions, the first set of rallies included 28 Catholic bishops as well as other Christian and Jewish leaders. This time around, Yonke said, publicity and group endorsements have “only been bigger.”

“We had 64,000 (people) last time,” he recalled, noting the attendance tally from the first round of coast-to-coast demonstrations that took place March 23. “I definitely think we’re going to top that.”

Leaders from a variety of faith backgrounds, politicians and educators met Thursday in Washington, D.C., for the National Religious Freedom Conference: Rising Threats to Religious Freedom, an event that organizers say is part of a battle against the trampling of religious liberties in the public sphere.

“This debate is not just about contraceptives, but about coercion. It’s not about Catholics it’s about conscience,” Richard Land, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention said during one of the panel discussions. He went on to say, “it’s about principle, not pelvic politics.”

Former Utah Gov. Michael Levitt, also a former Health and Human Services secretary, said of the conference, “This is the uniting of the faith community to declare that we’re going to fight back to defend religious freedom.”

The conference outlined three major threats to religious freedom: The first is the government mandate that religious institutions, such as hospitals and universities, act contrary to their conscience by offering birth control coverage to their employees. The second is what religious leaders say is a threat to the autonomy of religious organizations to choose their own leaders.

The third issue, a key one, is religious principles in in everyday life, like pharmacists who object for moral reasons to carrying what believers equate to abortion-causing drugs or religious student groups being marginalized on school campuses. One example of the latter is the fight at Vanderbilt University over its non-discrimination policy, requiring student religious groups be open to anyone, even those who don’t hold to their beliefs.

Conference participants see a prejudice that affects all religions.

“We need to find a way to bridge not only the faith divide but also the political divide to try to find a way where everybody can enjoy religious liberty,” Nathan Diament, director of public policy for the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, said. “It doesn’t have to be a zero sum game. Some people’s rights do not have to come at the expense of other peoples rights. We can find a way to make it a win-win situation for everybody.”

President Obama on Tuesday urged Congress to help strengthen federal supervision of international oil markets, amid pressure from U.S. voters to take action on rising gasoline prices.

The president wants Congress to increase penalties for market manipulation and empower regulators to increase the amount of money energy traders are required to put behind their transactions. […]

Many Democrats blame speculators for the high cost of gasoline. They would not go as far as to say that market manipulation is responsible for rising gas prices, but the officials said they wanted to curtail the ability of speculators to take unlawful advantage of oil price volatility.

At issue is the increasing role of investment in oil futures contracts by pension funds, mutual funds, hedge funds, exchange traded funds and other investors. Much of that money is betting that oil prices will rise. Analysts say it is possible that such speculation has somewhat inflated the price of oil.

At the same time, investors can also bet that prices will go down — indeed, speculators have been credited for low natural gas prices. Studies of the effects of speculation on oil markets indicate that it probably increases volatility, but doesn’t have a major effect on average prices.

U.S. President Barack Obama’s bid to dampen the influence of oil speculators by having regulators set trading margins could backfire, potentially making prices even more volatile and leaving crude dominated only by those with the deepest pockets.

Under Obama’s request to Congress, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) would determine how much speculators need to pay to trade U.S. crude oil futures, in theory increasing the amount when prices move too far, too fast.

But economists and traders cautioned that pushing smaller investors out of markets would only hand greater influence to the largest hedge funds and Wall Street banks. Ultimately, there may not be enough traders left to do business with oil producers and consumers looking to hedge their needs.

Exchange-operator CME Group, which currently sets margin requirements for the benchmark U.S. crude oil contract, on Tuesday called the president’s plan “misplaced”, and said speculation should not be confused market manipulation.

As a true Alinsky disciple, Obama’s specialty is to create a crisis through government policies, blame the private sector for the results, and then take further government control of the industry. Lather, rinse, repeat.

After drawing 54,000 people to 143 nationwide protests, leaders of the Stand Up For Religious Freedom campaign are more determined than ever to end the federal contraception mandate.

“From coast to coast, the response of the crowds at these rallies was a tremendous optimism that we can change the HHS mandate,” said Pro-Life Action League Executive Director Eric Scheidler, who planned the March 23 “Rally for Religious Freedom” with Citizens for a Pro-Life Society.

“People came out for the very first time in their lives, to any sort of grassroots protest activity,” Scheidler said of Stand Up For Religious Freedom’s first effort.

“That happened in Chicago. It happened in San Francisco, in Washington, D.C., in New York, Philadelphia, and other large cities.”

Each of those cities drew between 900 and 2,500 people, united in their desire to restore religious freedom by ending the president’s contraception coverage rule.

“Before the rally, there was a real sense almost of despair – and certainly discouragement – that the federal government would be trying to strong-arm the religious institutions of this country,” Scheidler said, describing the mood he observed after the controversial rule was confirmed earlier this year.

Health and Human Services’ rule, requiring many religious institutions to offer contraception, sterilization, and abortion-causing drugs through their health plans, is being challenged in court by eight states. Scheidler said the rallies allowed individuals and communities to take a stand as well.

“People were hearing about it on Facebook, on Twitter, in the ‘blogosphere,’ and on Christian radio,” the event’s co-organizer recalled.

“Finally, in the days before the rally, they were hearing about it through the secular media.”

The result was a broad coalition, drawing citizens of all faiths and none. “Catholic, Protestant, Jewish – even atheists and pagans came out to protest the HHS mandate, in unity with each other.”

Turnout at last week’s rallies exceeded Scheidler’s expectations, and confirmed his sense that March 23 was “a starting point” for the larger effort.

“I was hoping that we just might be able to reach 10,000 attendees across the country,” Scheidler said. “In fact, we’ve confirmed over 54,000 people came out, and that number’s climbing as I get reports.”

“Every indication is that the rallies were not an end, but a beginning – because people are fired up now.”

Participants at the events were urged to take action in the weeks and months to come, by raising awareness among their friends and neighbors and calling on members of Congress.

So Secretary Sebelius is essentially admitting that the Obamacare mandate is a form of forced participation in government-sanctioned population control?

The way these people’s minds work is downright sick. They view individuals in light of their value to the state, not as human beings. In this case, people are a drain on the welfare state because of the cost to cover their health care, so fewer is better.

Clearly ignored is how much value every individual adds to society through the ways that they labor and create and come up with new ideas, the taxes that they pay and charitable activities they engage in…and in plenty of other ways that can never be measured by cold-hearted, calculating central planners.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told a House panel Thursday that a reduction in the number of human beings born in the United States will compensate employers and insurers for the cost of complying with the new HHS mandate that will require all health-care plans to cover sterilizations and all FDA-approved contraceptives, including those that cause abortions.

“The reduction in the number of pregnancies compensates for the cost of contraception,” Sebelius said. She went on to say the estimated cost is “down not up.”

On a side note, who exactly does Sebelius think is going to pay for all those unsustainable Medicare and Social Security payments the Left is so enamored with, if there are fewer workers and taxpayers to pay into a system overburdened by an aging population? Will rationing boards and “death panels” pay for themselves through a reduction in the number of seniors, too?

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